Stories

Spanning 7 levels and bringing you nearly 40 interactive coding challenges, Rails 4 Patterns follows up on Rails Best Practices and teaches you common practices and techniques to help your Rails application stand the test of time. Learn how to avoid pitfalls in ActiveRecord, extract reusable components and concerns, build a JSON API, and more.

Last Friday, Ruby Hero Brian Shirai announced the release of Rubinius 2.0. And, with this release, Rubinius is moving toward concentrating on being the foundation for modern concurrent and distributed applications.

Miguel Camba put together a blog post where he recorded Ruby benchmarks across MRI, JRuby, and Rubinius using the ruby­benchmark­suite. Rubinius actually ran faster than the current Ruby 2.1 dev branch and even beat JRuby 1.7.4 in all of the multithreaded tests.

JRuby 1.7.5 was released yesterday! Aside from a number (243) of issues resolved, this new version brings improved transcoding support, Ripper support, Fiber fixes, and encoding and multilingualization improvements. It seems like pathname, date and time have been sped up. Call performance for magic globals has been increased as well, and block and proc creation and dispatch has been improved as well. It’s interesting to note that as the Rubinius project did, the JRuby project moved several standard library pieces into gems with this release.

This weekend, Piotr Solnica released Virtus 1.0. Virtus was built from extracting the dynamic property definitions in DataMapper into its own library. Think of it kind of similarly to attr_accessor but with 100% more utility, or as they put it, “Attributes on Steroids for Plain Old Ruby Objects.” It supports defaults, type checks, coercion, and a whole lot more. Everyone has probably rolled their own library for doing something like this and Piotr and the rest of the team have done an incredible job with Virtus.

A lot of people apparently signed up for Ruby on Sails but sponsors were hard to find and Jim found himself having to put $7,200 of his own money to cover the cost. To help him out you can purchase a Ruby on Sails t­-shirt. If Jim closes the fundraising gap he will donate any excess funds to Rails Girls South Florida. The event is still 4 sponsors short, so don’t hesitate to get in touch with info@rubyonsails.info if you’re interested.

Previous Episodes

Better layouts with Nestive, a Ruby port of the Resty tool, more extensible exception handling with rescue_from, flexible bindings for IRB, compliance with Sandi's rules of Ruby, and Faye 1.0 all in this episode of the Ruby5!

Well, better late than never! The podcast was recorded, but the lack of bandwidth at a campsite delayed the publication. Still, we have interesting news on a/b testing tools, encryption with Snowden, poking fun at Canada, and other news in this RubyLoco-powered Ruby5.